A wave of closures and cutbacks is sweeping through China’s private art museums, ringing alarm bells about the sector’s sustainability and raising questions about the outlook for one of the world’s biggest art markets.
The Jupiter Museum of Art, in Shenzhen, announced its shutdown in June. Days later, Qingdao’s TAG Art Museum followed suit. Others, such as Ennova Art Museum in Langfang, founded by the company behind Hong Kong-listed ENN Energy Holdings, have been dormant for months.
Even the...
A wave of closures and cutbacks is sweeping through China’s private art museums, ringing alarm bells about the sector’s sustainability and raising questions about the outlook for one of the world’s biggest art markets.
The Jupiter Museum of Art, in Shenzhen, announced its shutdown in June. Days later, Qingdao’s TAG Art Museum followed suit. Others, such as Ennova Art Museum in Langfang, founded by the company behind Hong Kong-listed ENN Energy Holdings, have been dormant for months.
Even the Beijing-headquartered UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art has come under financial pressure. Insiders say the pioneering 18-year-old institution withheld wages from January to June, and that its plans for its Shanghai branch, which opened in 2021, are unclear.
The current crisis in China is a result of corporate backers tightening their budgets, consumers curtailing their discretionary spending, and rising costs, people working at the museums tell the Post.
The UCCA was founded in Beijing’s 798 Art District in 2007 by the late Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens and is one of the oldest non-profit contemporary art centres in mainland China. Under long-time director Philip Tinari, it has maintained a solid international reputation for its ambitious and timely responses to contemporary trends.
The non-profit foundation, backed by private investors, has expanded its footprint aggressively, opening three more branches: in Beidaihe in 2018, Shanghai in 2021 and Yixing in 2024.
Several people working at UCCA have confirmed on condition of anonymity that most UCCA staff did not receive their full pay from January to June, and that there has been no activity at UCCA Edge in Shanghai since the June closing of an exhibition co-presented with the Saudi Ministry of Culture.
The landlord in Beijing – a state-owned enterprise – has grown more strict about rental payments for the UCCA building in the 798 Art District and no longer grants grace periods. This is exacerbating UCCA’s troubles at a time when international freight costs have soared and ticket sales are down because of China’s economic slowdown. UCCA has also struggled to claim payments from international partners for exhibitions, insiders say.
In an email interview, Tinari acknowledges that “it has been a difficult year for museums throughout China”.
Although he declines to comment on specifics, he notes that “as the consumer economy continues at a slower pace than before, individual visitors, supporters and sponsors are more careful with their resources than in the past”.
He adds the museum is “actively working towards long-term solutions that will allow us to sustainably fund our first-rate programme for the long term”.
Those working at UCCA say that the wages owed from previous months are being received gradually.
Lu Hongrong, director of the Jupiter Museum of Art, is open about the difficulties of running a museum that is a “real estate project in disguise”.
The museum – inside Shenzhen’s Futian Free Trade Zone and next to the border with Hong Kong – started out with 10,000 square metres (108,000 sq ft) of space and six large galleries, and is backed by Shenzhen Chenglian Logistics and Tempus Holdings.
In 2014, Tempus – then a travel agency listed on both the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges – won the right to develop an internet finance hub as part of Shenzhen’s broader push to attract hi-tech industries and financial firms to the free-trade zone.
According to Lu, Tempus acquired a 51 per cent stake in the art museum’s building from Chenglian Logistics in 2019, and it converted the building into museum-standard galleries.
“I was invited by them to set up the museum as a way to elevate the district’s image,” Lu says. Under their agreement, Tempus would repay the acquisition cost to Chenglian Logistics using public subsidies granted for running a museum.
Adding a private museum or other non-profit cultural component to a property project has been a common way for developers to tap into government subsidies, access cheap land or secure development rights since the 1990s, when the Chinese government started encouraging the private sector to bolster the number of museums in the nation.
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This, and the desire of the country’s growing number of wealthy art collectors to promote their collections, led to an explosion in the number of private museums during the 2010s. Between 2016 and 2020, an average of one new museum opened every two days, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in China.
Things, however, did not go as planned in Shenzhen.
In 2023, the Hong Kong courts ordered the liquidation of Tempus, which was then delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange. Meanwhile, Lu says Shenzhen Chenglian Logistics is still chasing the 60 million yuan (US$8.4 million) it says it is owed for the museum building. Shareholder funding for the museum stopped in 2021, and Lu scaled down the museum space by two-thirds.
The financial dispute escalated into a physical altercation between the two sides during the installation of the museum’s final exhibition, a solo show by Japanese artist Shiota Chiharu. It led to a delay of the exhibition opening, and Lu announced on June 22 that the museum would close on June 25.
Over in Qingdao, in the northern part of the country, a vast, ambitious museum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel opened in 2021. TAG Art Museum, also part of a property development project, made its presence felt by hosting exhibitions by internationally acclaimed artists like Antony Gormley, Ding Yi and David Hockney.
This was the brainchild of Meng Xianwei, an entrepreneur who built his fortune in outdoor advertising.
Meng partnered with the Qingdao City Construction Investment Group (QCCIG) to build a residential and commercial enclave known as The Artists’ Garden, and the museum was meant to add to its appeal. There was also a plan to build a branch of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) next to it.
However, China’s Ministry of Education issued new guidelines in 2021 prohibiting universities from establishing campuses outside their home provinces. As a result, just as the principal structure of CAFA’s Qingdao branch was completed in 2022, progress was halted.
In November 2024, Qingdao’s newspapers reported that QCCIG was seeking to sell its 35 per cent stake in the company behind The Artists’ Garden for 87.3 million yuan.
You Yang, the director of Beijing’s X Museum and former deputy director of UCCA, says many of China’s contemporary art museums face deep-rooted challenges. Some, he notes, lack the basics of fundraising know-how and budget management. Others are little more than marketing platforms, importing blockbuster shows without investing in local curation or research to anchor them meaningfully to their audience.
Winters are the hardest, says Wang Wenyu, curator at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum. The museum struggled to pay salaries at the start of the year, mostly because of a sharp drop in visitors during the colder months.
The fact that seasonal fluctuations in visitor numbers can have such critical cash-flow repercussions highlights the hand-to-mouth financial model of China’s contemporary art museums, which are mostly privately owned and do not receive state funding.
Despite these challenges, private contemporary art museums continue to pop up across the country. The latest news is that the Langfang local government has stepped in with emergency funding to keep Ennova Art Museum open, its director Zhang Zikang says.
Those who have witnessed the ebbs and flows of the sector caution that the root of the problem is the government’s unwillingness to provide backing for art that does not fit in with the range of artforms that the Communist Party condones.
You, at X Museum, says that the Chinese government expects museums and exhibitions to produce certain kinds of social value, which may be why there is still very little direct national funding for contemporary art museums.
Financial pressures will force curators to think harder about what is relevant to today’s increasingly sophisticated audience.
“You can’t simply tell the audience, ‘We’ve mounted a big show for a Western master – just come, buy the ticket and the cultural experience is complete,’” You says. “It’s not that simple.”
